Others Views of Paul Shepard
- For photo and biographical essay on Paul Shepard see (also below): www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=4967
- Chellis Glendenning's description of Paul Shepard's views from Mill's Turning Away from Tech
- 10,000 years ago Western humans began to dissociate from our place in nature because of domestication of plants/animals
- Wild things became enemies of new human-managed reality which was the sphere of the tame
- Survival became less and less based on psychic openness to nature and more and more on control and rationality
- Bron Taylor's gloss of Shepard's ideas
- Shepard argued that people in the world's remnant foraging societies were ecologically superior to and emotionally healthier
than those living in agriculture. Shephard thereby provided radical greens a cosmogony that explained humanity's fall from a
pristine, nature paradise.
- Amazon.com on Shepard:
- Paul Shepard was one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. Seminal works like The Tender Carnivore and
the Sacred Game, Thinking Animals, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, and Nature and Madness introduced readers to new
and provocative ideas about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Throughout his long and distinguished career,
Shepard returned repeatedly to . . . the central tenet of his thought: that our essential human nature is a product of our
genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and that the current
subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today's ecological and social ills. The fundamental question
raised by Shepard's work: What can we do to recreate a life more in tune with our genetic roots?
- QUOTES FROM SHEPARD'S WORK
- "We are space-needing, wild-country Pleistocene beings, trapped in overdense numbers in devastated, simplified ecosystems." "
Paul Shepard (1925-1996)
- "When we grasp fully that the best expressions of our humanity were not invented by civilization but by cultures that preceded it,
that the natural world is not only a set of constraints but of contexts within which we can more fully realize our dreams, we will be
on the way to a long overdue reconciliation between opposites which are of our own making." from Coming Home to the
Pleistocene
Paul Shepard, Preface from The Only World We've Got (1996)
- Shepard:
- A "Primitivist" who exhorts us to go "Back to the Pleistocene"
- A believer in evolutionary psychology (that our psychological nature was determined by our evolutionary past)
- Humans became what we are during the 2 million years of the Pleistocene (geologic age 1.8 million to 11,000 years ago)
- Time since the Pleistocene is 1/300 of human time
- Diamond example: If human life on planet was 24 hours long, agriculture came along at 11:54 pm (11,000 years ago)
- Shaped by a life of hunting and gathering
- We are whatever our DNA (in response to our environment) makes us
- True there are no universals, but that there are aberrations (people born w/o two legs) doesn't mean humans lack genetically
determined species characteristics
- Responds to anti-environmental charge that "nature lovers are incurably fixated on nostalgia for illusory past"
- Claim is "You can't go back"
- This is misleading
- Not necessary to go back in time to be the kind of creature you are
- Genes of past have come forward to us
- Not asking people to change genes, but their society in order to harmonize with an inheritance they already have
- Today we falsely believe that we are largely free from our biology and that this makes us fundamentally different from other
life forms
- This has resulted in ecological devastation
- We falsely believe that we can:
- Do anything we want
- Create our world according to taste
- Make any sexual and social relationship
- Eat whatever we want
- Critique of vegetarianism as denies our omnivorous ancestry:
- Vegetarianism is "a special arrogance masquerading as ethics"
- Need to celebrate death as a way of life; this is how nature works and should be affirmed
- It is not good for us to eat domesticated animals and plants, bred for appearance, size, keeping and convenience of machines
and who tend to be nutritionally deficient because our bodies are keyed to wild varieties of evolutionary past depleted
- During Pleistocene humans lived in harmony with nature
- Humans were few in number
- Sensitive to seasons and other life
- Humble in attitude toward earth
- Comfortable as one species among many
- Healthy (due to high infant mortality)
- Our effect on planet (our ecology) was stable and non-polluting
- Pleistocene humans (hunter-gathers) where far better off than people today
- Can make generalizations about primal peoples
- Rejects idea that they lived in fear of a wild threatening nature and cowered in caves
- This is a modern idea we project back onto them
- Rejects idea that scarcity is fundamental human condition
- Scarcity as a constant problem arose in era of agriculture
- For primal peoples, their lean numbers, ecological flexibility and richness of earth took care of this
- Our human numbers are the root of our problems leading to scarcity, tyranny, war, deprivation, abuse, terrorism, poverty
- True, primal peoples had problems as do all humans
- Not always live in perfect harmony with nature or each other
- Not always happy, content, well fed, free from disease
- Acknowledges homicide, suicide, sex and child abuse of natives living in fringe environments (deep tropical forests and
arctic)
- But their troubles hardly compare to the total amount of human suffering in modern cities or the catastrophe of industrial
greed that has so impaired human and natural life in name of progress
- Problems today not due to tech or materialism but industrial greed/growth
- Love of materials, the physical world, and extraordinary craftsmanship have made us humans (truth of Homo faber
idea)
- Industrial greed: corporate organization of economy, destruction of human community, blindness to place, disregard for
scale, its garbage, rapacity and excessive desire for "products"
- Amazingly, people think more industrial growth is way out of the collapse of human dignity and ravaging of
environment it has caused
- Traditional view of agriculture as instigator of progress is mistaken
- According to this view:
- Emergence of agriculture was necessary for civilization, as supported necessary density of people for cities (probably agrees
with this part)
- This led to "progress": literacy, inventiveness, security from want and natural dangers, leisure, great art, political
organization, health
- Reality is that agriculture was a disaster for people
- For average individuals, quality of life began to deteriorate with the domestication of plants and animals
- When shifted from primal human groups to agricultural states went from
- Homicide to war
- Murder to genocide
- Family hunger to starvation of populations
- Diversity in all areas of life to homogeneity
- Sickness of individuals to mass epidemics
- Council and group power to hierarchy of empires
- From occasional craziness to group insanity
- Agriculture led to overwhelming uncertainty
- Would one crop seeds come up?
- Would weather and disease wipe out the plants?
- Would flood wash it away?
- Adequate labor force to harvest it or off at war?
- Enemies burn fields?
- Why domestication of animals and plants has led to our alienation from nature
- When move from perennials to annuals, created new mode of perceiving reality, altered sense of time
- Amputated perspective on future
- Centered on hardy, quick growing, short lived plants
- Takers from the soil, not givers
- Dependent on man created and fertilized fields
- Dependent on disturbance and uniformity (monoculture) rather than diversity
- Domestication of animals deformed the fauna giving them exaggerated features (great milk-givers and plow pullers),
reduced social/physical requirements, diminished intelligence, vulnerability to epidemic disease and psycho-pathology
- Infantilized them and made them dependent on humans
- Humans replaced surroundings of wild diversity, maturity, rich mysterious other in elaborate webs of life
- With simplified biota of a few species dependent on us
- No wonder we began to think of nature as inferior and as an enemy to our civilized interests
- So religion invented God the maker, placed evil in wilderness, reserved soul for only humans, & located heaven someplace
else
- Led to paradigm that humans must control of nature out of necessity
- Idea took hold of regulating one's body, pests, predators, plants, animals, microclimates
- An intoxication with power
- Farmer tries to destroy his competitors (bees, fungi, birds, deer)
- Pastoral rancher kills lions and wolves
- Wild things become adversaries
- Wild becomes the enemy of the tame (and civilized)
- Wild things take up space, sunlight, water or invade crops (eating, trampling, or infecting them)
- Conclusion
- We have in us a spontaneous sense of connectedness to nonhuman life that should make us feel home on earth
- Strip off the veneer of civilization and you don't find a barbarian, but a connectedness to the earth
- "The genetic human knows how to dance the animal"
- This secret person is undamaged in each of us and may be called forth by most ordinary acts of life